Computer manufacturer Dell is to focus on customer satisfaction, which it admitted on Wednesday it "had not done perfectly in the past". The company is investing USD 150m in customer relationships this year, said chairman Michael Dell in New York on Tuesday. He hopes the business plan, called Dell 2.0, will reverse the flagging fortunes of the biggest computer maker in the world. Recent woes have included a poor quarterly earnings report and exploding laptop batteries.

Mike Hall caught up with Don Syme recently and recorded a few interviews covering Don's favorite programming language: F#. Don has done many great things over there in MSR Cambridge including creating everybody's favorite C# feature, Generics. Well, he also developed (with his team) the research programming language, F#. "F# is a programming language that provides the much sought-after combination of type safety, performance and scripting, with all the advantages of running on a high-quality, well-supported modern runtime system."

"When I first heard about the LCD used in the OLPC project, I was equally intrigued and sceptical. The claimed specifications put it, on paper, well into the league of the best panels available and, if manufactured using conventional technology, would present a major step forward in LCDs, which you would expect to carry a significant price premium."

Now that Microsoft has issued the first release canditate of Vista to testers, ExtremeTech has decided to build its own high-performance Vista machine. The article details component choices that will make for a machine that can attain a 'Windows Experience Score' of over 5. The build parts total over USD 2500, so fast Vista performance won't come cheap.

"Codenamed Kenstfield (Core 2) and Clovertown (Xeon), Intel's new quad-core processors will dramatically increase the amount of processing power you can have in a single system. Given that the Mac Pro features two LGA-771 sockets, you could theoretically drop two Clovertown processors in there and you'd have an 8-core Mac Pro. Without a doubt Apple will release a quad-core version of the Mac Pro, either by the end of this year or early next year, but are users who buy the Mac Pro today missing out? While we're still a couple of months away from being able to test a retail Clovertown CPU in the Mac Pro, we wanted to see if the current engineering samples of the chip would work."

A lot of hardware-related news today, but this one will probably mean the most to us alternative OS fans: it seems AmigaOS 4 has found hardware to actually run on. The board will have an IBM 750GL at 800 MHz with 1MB of L2 cache, and will support processors up to 1Ghz. Also: "One of the biggest changes to the Amy05 design from our first released specification is the addition of the AMD Geode CS5536 companion device. For Project Prometheus/Amy'05 this becomes Amy’s Southbridge." The current board is is a development board, and will be made available in a limited quantity for hardware testing/OS4 development.

Sun Microsystems has upgraded its low-end UltraSparc-based servers with faster 1.5GHz UltraSparc IIIi processors, the company said Wednesday. The move has been expected since August, when Sun said it scrapped its UltraSparc IIIi+ 'Serrano' processor and planned to upgrade the IIIi instead. The new chips are a notch faster than their 1.35GHz predecessors.

VIA Technologies announced this morning that the company's new C7-D processor is now available. That wouldn't seem like such a big deal if it weren't for the fact that VIA has also taken the initiative to make this the world's first carbon-free desktop CPU.

This article is about KDE's memory usage, but there are comparisons with other solutions for your desktop. Lubos Lunak concludes there is still work to do and there is some lowhanging fruit, but KDE does already a nice job on keeping its memory usage low.

If you are in Germany, the country of Sauerkraut and Beethoven, and you move far to the east, you might arrive at the town of Dresden. In this city, the Dresden University of Technology (TU Dresden) is located, which’s operating systems group has developed a C++ implementation of Jochen Liedtkes well-known L4 µ-kernel interface. This microkernel, ironically called Fiasco, is the center of all the different projects of the TU Dresden Operating System (TUD:OS) research group.

"One of the less well known Mac clones, the MaxxBoxx was released in Germany in July 1997 to fill the needs of users with very demanding applications. In a stunning enclosure, the MaxxBoxx was easy to open and upgrade. The machine was built into a cube that was twice as wide as an ordinary mini tower with room for up to ten drives." There's more on old Macs: Sonnet has announced new CPU upgrades for G4 PowerMacs and Xserves.

"Any computer user that's owned and installed software onto their computer knows that the more you install, the slower the beast runs. Most also know that it's not just quantity and that what you install plays a large factor in how slowly your computer runs. The aim of this article is to find out what types of application slow down a computer the most. I'm going to be measuring the 'speed' as the time it takes to shutdown, restart and get back to desktop (with auto-login) and start an application in the computer's start-up settings."

Apple held a special event for the press today. Most of the event was about iPods; prettier colours, bigger capacities, you know the drill. For the really interesting stuff, you had to sit out the whole thing: Apple gave us a sneak peek of a product coming in 2007. In Q1 2007, Apple will release a settop box, half the size of the Mac Mini, to which you can stream content. It has a built-in power supply, USB, ethernet, 802.11 'wireless component video', optical audio, HDMI ports, and old RCA stereo audio ports. It sports a Front Row-like interface, and can be controlled using the Apple remote. Its codename is 'iTV'; a different name will be chosen. It will work with iTunes on Macs and PCs, and it will cost USD 299. Update: Eugenia and I both blogged about the product announcements. Eugenia loves the gapless playback, and I miss adherence to industry standards.

USB support has been (re-)added to SkyOS, including of course the USB stack, a UHCI driver, support for control, interrupt, and bulk transfers, a USB HUB driver, a USB HID Keyboard driver, a USB HID Mouse driver, a USB Mass storage driver for CBI devices, including USB Harddisks, card readers, etc. The USB stack has been written from scratch and a new release containing USB support is expected.